7 Comments:

One of the problems is that two things are being conflated - robocalls and harassing calls. At the moment, this is helping the opposition, but it may hurt them in the long-run.

Why? Because the best explanation for many harassing calls to Liberals is that they came from the Liberal campaign. People's definitions of harassment can be pretty idiosyncratic (eg. they called during dinner). And that would square with the North Dakota caller id on some of the calls.

Even if there was Tory mischief with in-person calls (ie. separate from the robocalling), casting the wide net that has been established helps the Tories muddy the waters.

This is why you stick with the small story that is provable, and let it grow bigger, instead of the big story that requires caveats.

Also, when you are always in attack mode in the opposition, people (namely swing voters) start to discount what you say (never forget: when the Tories ran on adscam in 2004 they lost). It's like the boy who cried wolf (and right now there's a pretty plausible wolf).

Imagine if the Liberals had built up credibility by giving the government the benefit of the doubt (while stressing the need for an investigation)... waiting for a big - provable - revelation to twist the knife (and if that moment never comes, at least they'd avoid a Wafergate).

They're handling it perfectly. Every past scandal since 2006 has had two problems:

1) A liberal leader (two actually) who was ineffective in this kind of holding the government to account day after day.

2) The Conservatives daring them to force an election on whatever the issue was, implying they've got nothing if they don't. They'd back down because they were broke and would be blamed for the "needless" election.

Now it's the Conservatives that look like they're hiding something if they don't call an inquiry or even an election.

The opposition have orchestrated things so the Conservatives are whining about a staffer being politically incorrect by legally publicizing public information. The more we see the Conservative witch hunt over vikileaks the more they look a) petty and vindictive b) like they are trying use a firing offense to misdirect people from a criminal offense.

Manning up and taking responsibility over vikileaks just emphasizes the fact the Conservatives never take responsibility and blame others every time.

Their bloggers are all echoing this "strategy" of ignoring the very real questions here and attacking everyone else over relatively trivial matters.